Movie Poster of the Week: The posters of the 2011 Cannes Competition

The end of the world will be beautiful, or so says the Polish poster for Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, quite fittingly on the eve of the Rapture and in the aftermath of Von Trier’s cataclysmic Cannes press conference gaffe.

Movie Poster of the Week was very fortunate to be at the Cannes Film Festival for the first time this past week. Unlike most festivals, posters are not much in evidence there, with the exception of giant billboards on the Croisette announcing the likes of Tintin and The Expendables Part Two, and a lot of badly photoshoppedbig-head genre posters lining the walls of the booths in the market. However, with the help of Joe Bowman, who is renowned for his festival poster round-ups of yore, I’ve assembled almost all the posters from this year’s Competition slate.

Out of the 20 films in competition the only one I could not find any poster for, apart from a pretty but low-res teaser on Wikipedia, was Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place. And the designs for the two Japanese films in competition, Hanezu and Hara-Kiri are probably only press kit covers. Most of these posters are teasers at best and most are pretty underwhelming. The most notable exception is the Tree of Life poster with its multiple frames which I appreciate all the more having seen (and loved) the film (and which I prefer now to the design I featured back in December). But since that film opens next week after one of the longest countdowns in cinema history it naturally has the most fully realized design. There are a series of generic horror-looking posters online for Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In but I much prefer the medical illustration teaser below (the final design will no doubt instead feature Antonio Banderas in all his glory). And though I’ve been told that a new poster for We Need to Talk About Kevin was to be unveiled at Cannes, I’ve yet to see it. Of the rest I quite like the posters for Michael (obviously made before the film was accepted into competition), Sleeping Beauty, Habemus Papam and The Artist.

All the other posters after the jump. Next week: the best of the rest of Cannes.

My favorite of the lot is Almodóvar’s La Piel que Habito. It is unique from many other posters in that it is a live action film with a completely illustrated poster. I am constantly blown away by Almodóvar’s aesthetic decisions. The only thing that I don’t especially like is the title translation to English: “The Skin I Live In” is non-literal, and less a intense translation than the literal, which is “The Skin that I Inhabit”.